in the Piazza delle Terme, and had excited his sister's
curiosity to a painful pitch by his vivid descriptions of the
wonderful performance he had witnessed. Antonio, who was a quiet and
laborious man, listened with devout attention to Cranbrook's accounts
of the foreign countries he had visited, while Monna Nina sometimes
betrayed an invincible scepticism regarding facts which belonged to
the A B C of transatlantic existence, and unhesitatingly acquiesced in
statements which to an Italian mind might be supposed to border on the
miraculous. She would not believe, for instance, that hot and cold
water could be conducted through pipes to the fifth and sixth story of
a house and drawn _ad libitum_ by the turning of a crank; but her
lodger's descriptions of the travelling palaces in which you slept and
had your dinner prepared while speeding at a furious rate across the
continent, were listened to with the liveliest interest and without
the slightest misgiving. She had, moreover, well-settled convictions
of her own concerning a number of things which lay beyond Cranbrook's
horizon. She had a great dread of the evil eye and knew exactly what
remedies to apply in order to counteract its direful effects; she wore
around her neck a charm which had been blessed by the pope and which
was a sure preventive of rheumatism; and under the ceiling of her
kitchen were suspended bunches of medicinal herbs which had all been
gathered during the new moon and which, in certain decoctions, were
warranted to cure nearly all the ailments to which flesh is heir.

To Cranbrook the daily companionship with these kind-hearted,
primitive people had been a most refreshing experience. As he wrote to
a friend at home, he had shaken off the unwholesome dust which had
accumulated upon his soul, and had for the first time in his life
breathed the undiluted air of healthful human intercourse. Annunciata
was to him a living poem, a simple and stately epic, whose
continuation from day to day filled his life with sonorous echoes.
She was a modern Nausicaa, with the same child-like grandeur and
unconscious dignity as her Homeric prototype. It was not until to-day
that he had become aware of the distance which separated him from her.
They had visited together the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, where
a crude tableau of the Nativity of Christ is exhibited during
Christmas week. Her devoutness in the presence of the jewelled doll,
representing the infant Sav